This book examines the cultural and artistic awakening of New York City through a detailed look at the city's architecture and urbanism during the years '890 - 1925, when the city first acquired a distinct sense of itself as the representative American metropolis, comparable to London and Paris.

No building was more anticipated than Frank Gehry's stunning new museum in Bilbao, an industrial city in the Basque Country of northern Spain. Philip Johnson, the dean of American architects, declared it "the greatest building of our time," while Sverre Fehn, winner of the 1997 Pritzker Architecture Prize, called the building "fantastic." Gehry's use of nontraditional materials and his sensitivity to the environments of his buildings is legendary; his method of envisioning a building through semiautomatic drawings and handmade models is little known, but provides an immediate entry into his creative process. This book celebrates the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and details its design process, bringing to life one of Gehry's greatest achievements. Coosje van Bruggen, who has collaborated with Gehry on various architectural and art projects, documents the history of the Guggenheim Bilbao from conception through design and construction. With unique access to the architect and his studio, she uncovers scores of fascinating drawings and working photographs, published here for the first time.

""This is the most brilliant epitome of Manhattan ever written." --Mike Davis Every morning, the architect and writer Michael Sorkin walks from his apartment in Greenwich Village to his office in Tribeca. Unlike most commuters, Sorkin isn't in a hurry, and he doesn't try to drown out his surroundings. Instead, he's always paying attention. As he descends the narrow stairs of his town house, Sorkin explains why New York doesn't have the grand stairwells so common in European apartment buildings. Stepping out onto his block, he imagines a better, more efficient, far less dirty way to dispose of garbage. As he crosses Canal Street, he remembers the mad proposals for tunnels, elevated highways, and mega-structures that threatened lower Manhattan and could have destroyed its urban fabric. Fifty years after Jane Jacobs's groundbreaking The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Sorkin's vision of city life is every bit as perceptive and fine-grained as that of Jacobs's classic. With important insights into history, architecture, and public policy, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan is an extraordinary, deeply personal look at a city undergoing--always undergoing--dramatic transformations"--

Often referred to as the city of the future, Los Angeles is known for its sprawl, its constant change, and its special relationship to the film industry. The twelve contributors to Looking for Los Angeles focus on dramatic shifts in the urban landscape, important moments in the city's architectural history, and the role of the image in this mecca of image makers. Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom searches for Los Angeles's center and finds a city that "breaks itself down, builds itself up again, displaces and regroups itself" and where "freedom of movement" is a basic premise of life. Historian Philip Ethington documents the city's changing character in both text and images, urban studies professor Dana Cuff exposes the demise of once-thriving urban neighborhoods to make way for Modernist housing projects, and anthropologist Susan A. Phillips invites us on a personal journey into "the projects" to meet gang members and their families today. Artist Robbert Flick offers a sixteen-page, full-color photo-essay that takes us on a "drive-by" along Alameda Avenue, architectural historian Thomas S. Hines traces Frank Lloyd Wright's influence on the life and career of photographer Edmund Teske, and film historian Robert L. Carringer examines Los Angeles as a setting for Hollywood feature films.

The author analyzes the ongoing debate between exclusivists such as Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey, and Peter Eisenman and inclusivists whom he sees as representatives of the first generation of post-moderist architects in America.

Since the 1950s American artists have used abstraction to deliberately attempt to confront the memory of the Holocaust or accepted commissions for memorial works. Examines individual paintings, an architectural project, a video installation, a site-specific sculpture, and commissioned works by Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, Sol LeWitt, and Ellsworth Kelley (all 1993) in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Concludes that abstract art works can represent the Holocaust in complex ways.

A lavishly illustrated look at the Native American architectural renaissance during the past 30 years. The Native nations are planning the buildings they need: including office & commercial buildings, schools, clinics, religious & community structures, urban cultural centers, houses, & museums. They want to make sure that the buildings are culturally appropriate or focus on collective decisions that embody community values brought from the past to the present. Examines the historical & legal background of this movement of cultural regeneration through the medium of architecture.

This collection of essays, most previously unpublished, spans the course of Tigerman's career. Included are writings on the history of Chicago architecture, architectural theory, and commentary on contemporaries.

American architect Morris Lapidus is best known as the designer of glamorous postwar resort hotels in Florida, such as the Fontainebleau (1954) and the Eden Roc (1955) in Miami Beach, and the Americana in Bal Harbour (1956). Yet in a remarkable sixty-year career that began in 1926, he designed more than 500 retail stores, hotels, apartment complexes, and stage sets that captured the popular spirit and changing face of Main Street America in the twentieth century. Lapidus created fantasy environments in which America's middle class, flush with expanding postwar incomes and optimism, could fulfill its desire for glamor, relaxed luxury, and leisure. His signature forms - chevrons, "beanpoles," "woggles," or amoeba shapes, and curving walls and ceilings punctuated by "cheese holes," or cutouts - have become treasured icons of American postwar vernacular architecture. Born in Russia in 1902, Lapidus was brought to New York by his parents a year later, and the family first settled on the Lower East Side. He completed his architecture degree at Columbia University and first earned a reputation by designing stage sets and retail stores in which he developed new theories in store design and essentially created the modern storefront as we now know it. For his famed resort hotels of the 1950s Lapidus designed not only the vast structures but a melange of quasi-French provincial and Italian Renaissance decorative elements that critics would dub "Miami Beach French," including everything from the tableware to his famous "stairways to nowhere." He was one of the first architects to acknowledge the cinema as an overriding influence on American taste.